xxxvi Introduction 



birds and insects have darted before me. I have constantly read 

 White's accounts of their habits and manners ; and I have been every 

 day more impressed by the depth and width of his knowledge, the 

 accuracy of his observation, the candour of his mind, and the intimate 

 acquaintance he possessed with the outer life of nature in England. 



From this point of view, the value of White's work is universal and 

 permanent. His method is even more important than his results. He 

 teaches one how to observe ; he shows us by an object-lesson of patience 

 and watchfulness how we ought to proceed in the investigation of 

 nature. In his time, all the work was still to do. In ours, for 

 Europe at least, the greater part of it has been already done. 'To-day, 

 if a boy or a man wants to know about the plants, the birds, the fish, or 

 the insects of the country in which he lives, he usually begins by 

 " buying a book about them." He collects specimens, of course, and 

 identifies them with his book ; but as soon as he has found out to what 

 particular species each specimen belongs, he generally contents himself 

 with reading up what his book says about it, and then rests satisfied 

 that he has fairly " done " that plant or animal. Thus the very perfec- 

 tion at which our text-books have arrived stands in the way of first- 

 hand observation. Book-knowledge tends more and more to supersede 

 direct contact with nature. But White may suggest to us a more 

 excellent way. The record of his long years spent in finding out for 

 himself what the beasts and birds really did do makes us feel that 

 books are of little use beside direct eyesight. Nowadays, the traveller 

 in relatively new lands has to watch the fauna and flora as White 

 watched them in England ; but at home in Europe it is too often the 

 case that intimacy with printed pages is substituted for intimacy with 

 the objects they describe for us. 



Nor is this all. White has another and a higher side. He repre- 

 sents the dawn of the philosophic spirit in science. In no small 

 degree, he leads up to the generation of colossal thinkers the generation 

 of Lyell, Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley. 



The learned men of the sixteenth century, it often seems to me, were 

 individually wasted for the sake of humanity that came after them. 

 They spent their lives in useless wrangling over petty points of 

 Ciceronian Latin and Periclean Greek; they accumulated stores of 



